When you open a new business, you don’t just sit back and hope that people will show up.
You advertise. You post on social media, tell your friends and neighbors, and do all that you can to promote your product to gain and retain customers.
There’s no reason the public school system shouldn’t be doing the same, Brian Stephens, the CEO of Caissa Public Strategy — a strategic communications firm — told Business Insider.
“Allow everyone to compete,” Stephens said. “If they don’t compete and they don’t present their best foot forward, they’re going to go out of business. And I think that’s devastating for society.”
Some public schools facing declining enrollment hire Stephens’ firm to help them recruit new students. The firm calls parents, sends out mailers, creates digital advertisements, and sends ground crews to knock on parents’ doors and promote their local public school.
He even uses a “secret shopping” strategy, where he’ll send staffers who pretend to be parents to schools to better learn what parents see when they visit.
“It takes as many as 21 contacts to explain to a parent all their choices and then ultimately hope that they pick the right choice for their family,” Stephens said. “Maybe it’s a public school, maybe it’s not, but the choice is shown.”
Business Insider is exploring how America’s public schools are fighting an enrollment decline due to the school choice movement, declining birth rates, funding challenges, and more. Share your story with this reporter at [email protected].
While Stephens said his firm has helped boost enrollment at many of the schools he works with, it’s not enough to reverse the larger declining enrollment trend nationwide. The National Center for Education Statistics projected that public school enrollment in the US will fall by 7.6%, or nearly 4 million students, by 2031 due to declining birth rates and growth in the school voucher movement. Some districts have had to shut down schools as a result, and uncertainty with federal funding is an added strain.
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Business Insider spoke with teachers and administrators in Broward County, Florida — a county that has faced steep enrollment declines — to learn how schools are fighting to keep their doors open. The efforts include parent tours, showcases, innovative marketing, and more.
“I was the one doing every school tour, all 60 of them,” Stephanie Saban, the principal at Coral Cove Academy of the Arts, told Business Insider. “We held two showcases in the neighborhood, and we invited a lot of the community out to see our performances.”
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If private schools and charter schools can call parents and market what they offer, public schools should be doing the same, Stephens said.
“If you believe in school choice but you don’t want public schools to compete, then you don’t really believe in school choice,” Stephens said.
‘Constant showcasing the program’
Gastride Harrigan, the principal at Millennium 6-12 Collegiate Academy in Broward County, knows that marketing is a crucial element of his job.
He said that a big “selling point” for parents is that the school offers students the opportunity to graduate with both an associate degree and a high school diploma, and he makes sure to promote that whenever he can.
“Competition is fierce, and it’s constant showcasing the program,” Harrigan told Business Insider. He said that he focuses on building relationships with the feeder elementary school, which means going to their meetings and events and “making sure parents understand who we are, what we offer.”
He added that it’s not just speaking about the programs Millennium offers — it’s including students in the conversation.
“If you hear from the kids who go through the program, whether in middle or high, then I think it’s a better selling point than me trying to tell you the benefits of them,” Harrigan said.
On December 9, Broward County Public Schools is holding a showcase to advertise opportunities at schools county-wide. The flyer for the showcase said that families will learn more about the county’s K-12 magnet programs, “innovative” curriculum offerings, and “unique programs tailored to student success.”
Northeast High School’s principal, Anthony Valachovic, embraces this strategy. His school promotes its ACEs program, which allows students to pursue an educational pathway tailored to aviation, technology, or the arts. The school’s magnet coordinator goes to showcases, local sports games, and other community events to get the word out. It’s working: on the 10th day of the current academic year, Northeast enrolled 1,822 students, compared to 1,689 at the same time last year.
“It boils down to finding programs that match the students’ interests and really tailoring what you’re doing to your actual school population,” Valochovic said.
Schools can’t control some of the factors contributing to tanking enrollment, like declining birth rates. But they can control their messaging, and Stephens said now is a critical time for them to shape their own narrative.
“Public schools are getting more and more in the game every day,” Stephens said. “I think that’s a good sign, and could be awesome for us as a nation.”
